What's Up DOCumentation
Robelle Consulting Ltd.
Unit 201, 15399-102A Ave.
Surrey, B.C. Canada V3R 7K1
Phone: (604) 582-1700
Fax: (604) 582-1799
Date: May 1, 1992
From: Robert M. Green, CEO
David J. Greer, President
Michael Shumko, Customer Support
To: Users of Robelle Software
Re: News of the HP 3000, 1992 #2
What You Will Find in This News Memo:
News Tidbits
Happy Birthday to Us
Technical Tips
About Robelle
Robelle Products: Problems, Solutions, and Suggestions
News Tidbits
¸Robelle OlÅ!
Robelle Consulting Ltd. now has local representation in Mexico. We are happy
to announce Infosistemas Financieros, S.A. de C.V. as our new distributor in
Mexico. Infosistemas has forty employees and has been in business since 1978.
They were the first company in Mexico to sign an OEM and later EDP (VAR)
agreements with Hewlett-Packard. The company is organized into three
divisions: mini computer systems, commercial and PC systems, and HP 3000
software products. You can contact Infosistemas by phone at +52 5 254 3274.
Is Anyone Still Using MPE/IV?
Robelle is considering changes to its software that would call intrinsics that
are NOT available on MPE/IV. If you are currently on support and this affects
you, please contact us at (604) 582-1700.
GUI for MPE/iX?
At the recent BWRUG meeting in Rockville, Jeff Vance from HP discussed plans
for a Graphical User Interface that would sit on top of the MPE Command
Interpreter, just as Windows sits on DOS. You can easily forsee a time when
computers will have the same look and feel, no matter what kind of an
operating system they have.
MPE/V Still Running.
At the same BWRUG meeting in Rockville, enhancements for MPE/V were announced.
Look for a Changegroup command, Redo List, 'wildcard' Purges, 'wildcard'
Altsec and an Altuser command that allows '+cap' and '-cap' changes. Some of
these are already available on MPE/XL but the wildcard features are completely
new. Additionally, Jeff mentioned that there are currently more HP
programmers working on the MPE/V command interpreter than on the MPE XL CI.
New Qedit 4.0
Robelle continues to enhance Qedit, the full-screen editor for all HP 3000
computers. Qedit is a complete environment for programmers, interfacing with
most software tools on the HP 3000. You can remain inside Qedit all day,
since it supports direct compile of the workfile (without saving!), PREP,
LINK, RUN, UDCs and Command Files, and allows you to suspend tools like MPEX
and Quiz for instant access. Qedit also has a compatible line-mode, essential
for batch editing jobs, so you only need one text editor for all tasks.
Some of the highlights of the new Qedit are:
* Now in Native-Mode for greater speed.
Qedit is now available in Native-Mode as well as the Classic version.
The installation job stream automatically installs the Native-Mode
versions on MPE XL machines.
* Trap syntax errors and correct them in full-screen mode.
Editerr traps syntax errors for C/XL, Pascal, SPL, and COBOL. Qedit
displays the error in your source file for you to correct in full-screen
mode.
* Undo Command to cancel previous commands.
Now you can relax! If you make a typo or a mental slip, no problem.
You can Undo commands, one by one, all the way back to when you texted
or opened the file. Of course, if you were right in the first place,
you can Undo the Undo.
Listundo shows the commands that Qedit will Undo, including text of the
lines. Qedit displays the complete change log, starting with the change
you just made, so you can see what would be Undone before you Undo it!
* Qedit includes an English spelling checker.
The Spell bonus program comes with an 80,000 word dictionary, and you
can add your own words. You can use it on Qedit or Keep files, and call
it from any programming language.
All the new features are explained in the change notice and new user manual,
included on the update tape. You can print them with our easy-to-use printing
utility, Printdoc, or use the complete on-line help file. Qedit users still
on support with us received an update tape automatically, along with a new
printed manual and Quick Reference Guides. Overseas customers are being sent
their updates right now. If you are a former Qedit user whose service has
lapsed, you can get back on service with no penalty.
Others who are interested in Qedit and would like to try out the new features,
can call us at (604) 582-1700 for information on free trials.
Happy Birthday to Us
Robelle is 15 Years Old
By Robert Green
My decision to found Robelle occurred when my employer, a distributor of nuts
and bolts, sold twenty copies of a transaction logging program that I had
written. He got $1000 for each, and did it in less than a year without doing
any sales work. "Wait a second", I thought, "What's wrong with this picture?
You write a program once, then sell copies of it, each time charging $1000 for
a $12 magnetic tape. That beats working for a living."
Incorporating Robelle Consulting Ltd. in April 1977, I rented myself back to
my former employer and set out to write a software product. Since my biggest
frustration with the HP 3000 was the Editor, that was a natural target. Our
little 128K-byte HP 3000 supported 35 users. If I Texted a file, response
stopped on all the other CRTs. I often came to work early to Text in my file,
then waited until lunch to compile. Qedit's design goal was the fastest
possible program editing with the lowest possible system load.
We probably owe the success of Qedit to a one-time HP employee named Fred and
HP's reluctance to fire anyone. In the sixties, Fred had been a student
radical at UC Berkeley. He came to work in the publications department of HP
Cupertino, where I was also writing user manuals. Unfortunately, Fred could
neither spell nor understand grammar. Naturally, HP transferred Fred to the
programming group. All the good programmers were busy on the exciting parts
of MPE such as the memory manager and the dispatcher. No one wanted to work
on anything as dull as a text editor. Fred had never programmed before, but
he created Edit/3000 and HP has been stuck with it ever since.
An informal survey of HP sites revealed that most DP managers could spend
about $1000 without approval, so Qedit's yearly rental was set at $960. My
goal was to sell twenty rentals, then sit back and live off the income. I
convinced Annabelle Green, my wife at the time, to join the company and do the
administration: "one or two invoices a month, no big deal". By the time she
retired in 1991, Qedit was installed on over 3200 systems in every corner of
the globe. By the way, the company name comes from Rob + belle.
The first version of Qedit was written in four months, working nights and
weekends through a 1200-baud acoustic coupler. It was blazingly fast and I
could edit programs during the day shift again. It was quite a shock to find
that Qedit did not sell itself. As a naive computer nerd, I expected people
to beat a path to my door. After 6 months, not even a nibble of interest.
That's when I came up with the Robelle marketing strategy: write entertaining
technical papers showing how to solve widespread performance problems, then
present the papers at any meeting of ten or more users, slipping in a few
discreet references to Qedit.
One of the high, and low, points of our early marketing was selling a
corporate license for Qedit and Suprtool to Hewlett-Packard. For a small fee
(don't ask how small), HP obtained a perpetual right to use the software on
any HP 3000 they owned, anywhere in the world. The extra credibility for
Robelle and the small army of boosters we gained were great, but we never
imagined how many CPUs HP would eventually acquire. If only we had put some
upper limit on the contract, any number of CPUs, no matter how outrageous,
then we could have renegotiated the deal later. Ah well, ... sigh.
In those days I didn't realize that it was impolite to steal employees from
your customers. I met David Greer at a consulting site, where he did COBOL
programming while finishing his Computer Science degree. Despite being
part-time, David produced more working code than the full-time programmers.
This was a brain that we could use at Robelle. When he finished school, we
offered him a job and David jumped at the opportunity to do systems
programming.
By this time our installed base had shot way past the original goal of twenty
customers and the number of envelopes to be stuffed each month was out of
hand. I didn't think that folding and mailing What's Up Documentation
newsletters was a suitable task for the company president. Having worked with
Kerry Lathwell for six years at the nuts and bolts company, I knew her
brilliant organizing skills. I talked her into coming to Robelle by offering
her a desk by the window (she had always worked in a windowless room) and
promising her she would never have to work with numbers. Kerry now runs our
entire administrative operation, including financial management and
accounting, but she still has a window.
With four people, we moved the office to a horse farm. The location was
idyllic: a log chalet with a panoramic view of the rugged coastal mountains
from a high river bluff. Instead of bartering our software for computer time
with local users, we bought our own HP 3000 minicomputer.
David and I did the programming, the technical support and the marketing, plus
found time to write countless technical papers. Do you remember the Image
Handbook and the Smug Proceedings? When we finally decided to expand the
technical staff, we didn't do it the easy way. We went across the continent
to Montreal to snatch Mike Shumko from a Qedit shop where he caught our
attention by asking the most cogent tech support questions. When we needed
another "techie", we tracked down a former user who was on a year-long trip
around the world. We left messages in India, Tibet, and Turkey. We finally
caught up with him in Portugal, where he agreed to work for Robelle, if we
would wait three months for him to finish his travels.
My goal was always to keep Robelle small and simple, but I also traveled to
users groups. It seemed like every time I went on a trip I came back to find
that we had hired another new person to stuff envelopes. For example,
Annabelle met Marie Froese at the riding stables and enticed her away from a
tack shop. But secretly, Marie had a University degree and is now our Sales
Manager.
By 1991 we had grown to twelve people and three HP 3000s and were forced to
give up our 450 square-foot log chalet. Robelle now resides in a brand new
office building with a window for every employee and a mauve color scheme. Of
course we still do things in a Robelle way. We had a full kitchen installed,
just like on the farm, and the job of making lunch rotates from person to
person (company-paid lunch is an unusual employee benefit at Robelle).
I still do the programming for Qedit, working from home or my summer cabin,
but it means aggressively delegating administrative tasks. I call this
"enriching your job". David Greer programs Suprtool and Xpress, and is in
charge of the overall R&D effort. When Annabelle retired, David bought her
share of Robelle, which means that he now manages administration too. Once
again, I was saved from that fate.
Robelle remains a technology-oriented firm. David and I spend most of our
time programming. Financially speaking, this policy has worked extremely
well. And it means we hit the floor running each morning, eager to get to
work.
After 15 years, we still strive to keep our administrative overhead low. This
way we can maintain reasonable prices while providing excellent support and
the occasional bonus surprise such as the Spelling Checker and Fortune Cookie.
This formula has served us well, along with hard work, a dash of good luck,
and incredibly smart customers. And wherever you are today Fred, thanks.
Technical Tips
DC1/DC2 Correction.
The article on Terminal Handshaking in the last news memo switched DC2 to DC1
in the discussion of Block Mode flow control. Here is the correction:
The terminal sends a DC2 when you press Enter and MPE replies with an
Escape code to Home Up and a DC1 to trigger the transfer. This
arrangement only works if G=YES and H=NO. MPE XL improves the speed of
block transfers by eliminating the Home Up and the DC1 trigger. Instead
of sending a Home Up Escape code, MPE XL enables a terminal option to do
an automatic Home Up when you press Enter. That is why block-mode will
not work on some older terminals. Instead of the DC1, the DTC provides a
type-ahead buffer for the screen contents when you press Enter in
block-mode.
Problem With $STDIN in Batch on MPE XL.
Years ago, Eugene Volokh of VESoft wrote a QA column in Interact that
discussed an interesting feature of programs run in batch. If a program has
its input defined in the job after the !RUN command, and it terminates before
reading all of the input statements, the batch job may abort, even if you
precede the !RUN statement with !CONTINUE. This is because MPE will read the
next input statement that was intended for the program and try to execute it
as an MPE command.
A workaround for this problem is for the program to open $STDIN or $STDINX
explicitly. When the program terminates MPE will ignore all subsequent input
until it finds a command that starts with a command interpreter prompt
character (e.g., !). Programs written in FORTRAN and PASCAL will
automatically open $STDIN or $STDINX. Other programs, like Robelle's Suprtool
written in SPL/SPLash, open $STDINX explicitly.
We recently discovered that this feature applies to programs that are invoked
directly from the CI on MPE XL (with the !RUN statement), but not when the
same program is invoked from a UDC or Command File. For example, MPE will
ignore extra Suprtool commands if Suprtool terminates prematurely when it is
invoked by :Run Suprtool.Pub.Robelle. However, MPE will not ignore the extra
commands if Suprtool is invoked by a UDC that simply executes the :Run
statement. The SR number for this problem is 5000-655183.
HP LaserROM.
HP's PC-based LaserROM software isn't 100% compatible with the new Microsoft
Windows 3.1 upgrade. The HP product, which allows quick on-line access to HP
manuals, Software Status Bulletins and other documentation, still works as it
did under Windows 3.0, but the PC locks up when exiting from LaserROM back to
Windows. However, typing Ctrl-Alt-Del will unlock the application and return
to Windows. HP is investigating. If an update to the LaserROM software is
required, it would probably be distributed on the same CD as the monthly CD
subscription update.
Multi-DB Transactions.
DBXBEGIN assigns 1MB memory for the multi-db transactions. If this 1MB is
exceeded, you do not get any warning or Image errors. Your program aborts,
and the transaction manager backs out the changes. [Craig Engel, Euclid
Industries]
About Robelle
Party in New Orleans.
You're invited to our 15th anniversary celebration in New Orleans this August.
Fifteen years is a long time in the software business, and we'd like you to
join us in our celebration. We have planned a night of fun for all of our
friends.... hope to see you there!
Calendar of Events
May 1992 * David Greer will be at the annual BARUG conference in Santa
Cruz, May 6-9.
* David and Ken will be at the annual SCRUG conference in
beautiful downtown Burbank, May 12-15. David will present a
tutorial on designing user interfaces.
* Look for David Greer at the International Users Group
meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, on May 20-22.
June 1992 * Suprtool training class at Robelle June 22-23. Two days of
in-depth training for programmers. Call for details.
August 1992*Interex International Users Group Conference, New Orleans,
August 24-27. A full complement of Robellians will be in
attendance. Robelle events include:
Monday, 24th:
How Developers Can Adopt Self-Describing Files, David
Greer.
Robelle Customer Appreciation Party.
Tuesday, 25th:
Learn Ten Essential Qedit Skills, Mike Shumko.
Qedit Problem Solving with the Developer, Bob Green.
The Warning Signs: A Pop Quiz on Quality, Bob Green.
Wednesday, 26th:
Learn Ten Essential Suprtool Skills, Mike Shumko.
Suprtool Performance with the Developer, David Greer.
Thursday, 27th:
LaserJet Lustre - Making Your HP 3000 Reports Shine, Ken
Robertson.
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Robelle Products: Problems, Solutions, and Suggestions
Qedit Version 4.0
132 Columns in Reflection.
Recently one of the most common, and most confusing support questions has
been, "How can I get my PC into 132-column mode?" The answer lies in the
hardware capabilities of the PC, and in the terminal emulation software being
used. Reflection for DOS has the ability to alter the display width
dynamically, and Qedit takes advantage of this feature. When you go into
visual mode in a file whose width is greater than 76 columns, Qedit sends a
command to Reflection to set the display width to the width of your file plus
four columns. The extra four columns are for the line indicators that Qedit
puts at the front of each line. For example, editing a 100-byte file will
result in Qedit asking Reflection to set the width to 104. Reflection's
response to this request depends on the type of display adapter that you have
in your PC, and the configuration in Reflection. You have to tell Reflection
what kind of display adapter your PC has. This is done on the global config
screen (Alt-C, F7) in the field labeled 132 column adapter.
With the adapter configured as the default value, NONE, Reflection adjusts its
logical display width but does not change how your screen looks. This means
that your screen still shows 80 columns at a time, but you use
Ctrl-Right-Cursor and Ctrl-Left-Cursor to scroll your display right or left.
Your display physically shows only 80 columns, but logically has 104 columns,
and you can scroll left and right. You are already familiar with this concept
for vertical scrolling: Your screen physically shows only 24 lines, but you
use Ctrl-Up, Ctrl-Down, Page Up and Page Down to scroll up and down.
With the 132 column adapter configured in Reflection to a non-default setting,
say, PARADISE or ATI-WNDR, Reflection changes the size of the characters so
that 132 columns can be displayed at one time. If the width that Qedit
requested is not more than 132, then you see the whole width of the file on
your screen and left and right scrolling is not available. If Qedit requested
wider than 132 columns, then you see 132 columns at a time, and you can still
use the left and right scrolling available with the Ctrl-cursor keys.
Unfortunately this dynamic width capability is not available in the Windows or
Macintosh versions of Reflection. In Reflection for Windows 3.7 you can set
the terminal to be in 80 column mode or 132 column mode, much like a 700/92
terminal. Qedit cannot set it to any other widths besides these two values.
In practice this means that you choose one of these settings and stick with
it. If the file is wider than the display, then you must use Qedit's SET LEFT
command to set the starting column that you want to see, as you would do on a
terminal without any fancy capabilities.
Tip: if you change your terminal settings manually while you are in Qedit,
Qedit won't know about your changes. Type set visual stop to make Qedit
figure out your current settings.
Incrementing numeric value in a file.
Suppose you have a file with a numeric value in it, say a batch number or
control number, and you want to increment that number. Here is a Qedit
command file which will do the job.
Assume the file has only one record, and the four-digit number is at the start
of the record.
USER DEFINED COMMAND FILE: INCR.CMD
/t tapenum
/c 1 "setjcw number = "
/use *
setjcw number = number + 1
/o *
/undoq
/c 1/4 "!number"
/k,yes
It isn't necessary to use Undo to return the file to its original state. You
could just use Text,Yes to re-text it (but Undo is more fun).
Suprtool Version 3.4
Check Your Job Streams. On the latest 3.4 version of Suprtool the
syntax checking of the Output command has been tightened. Misspelled options
that worked in the past will fail, causing your batch jobs to abort. The most
common of these is
>output filename,NODUPS { the 'S' is an error }
The NODUP option was part of the OUTPUT command back in version 3.2 but was
superceded by the new DUPLICATE command in version 3.3. The NODUP option is
no longer documented, but is still accepted by Suprtool 3.4 as long as it is
spelled correctly. The error checking has been improved to catch typos and
syntax errors. Our apologies go to anyone who is adversely affected by this
change.
If you have not installed version 3.4 yet and think that you have used the
incorrect NODUPS option then you have a number of options. 1) Remove the
extra S at the end of NODUPS. 2) Replace the NODUPS Output-option by the new
DUPLICATE command, which is more versatile. See the Suprtool manual or
on-line help for the syntax. 3) Call us for a pre-release version of Suprtool
that does support this mispelling.
Editerr Version 1.1
New HP Compilers. The latest NM compilers being shipped by HP have been
changed to display '/iX' instead of '/XL' in their banner. This change makes
them incompatible with current versions of Editerr, our syntax checking
program. If you have these new compilers then using the COBERR or EDERR UDCs
will produce the following.
Error: Compiler listing is not from a supported compiler.
That is because the EDERR program uses the banner info to determine how to
interpret the rest of the compiler listing. Call us for an updated version of
Editerr which should be available shortly. This affects the following NM
compilers : HP Cobol II A.04.06, HP Pascal A.04.05, HP C A.04.01, and any
other language with '/iX' in the banner.
Xpress Version 2.8
Sending Programs Through MCI Mail.
We have been making extensive use of Gateway/3000 to send messages directly
from our terminals to users and fax machines all over the world. Recently, we
have been trying to send messages directly to Steve Cooper at Allegro
Consultants, Inc. (and chairperson of SIGIMAGE). After a couple of attempts,
we managed to send messages directly from my terminal in Vancouver to Steve's
in Redwood City, California.
Steve always signed his letters with an "electronic" signature. I commented
to Steve that I liked this and within an hour Steve had sent me the complete C
source code to the program that produces these signatures. I was able to
extract the source code (it was in three source modules), compile it, and link
it on our Series 922LX. Pretty amazing, since what Steve sent me was a UNIX
script. Below is the output from this program for my name:
/ /
__/ __. , __o __/ _, __ _ _ __
(_/_(_/|_\/